Techno-Colonization of Academic Knowledge Production

Speaker: Stefan Klein, University of Münster; Moderator: Anna Bon, VU Amsterdam

Over the past 30 years, the leading academic publishers (often referred to as the “Big Five” – Elsevier, SpringerNature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Sage) have morphed from publishers of scholarly manuscripts into research infrastructure and information analytics businesses, combining monopolistic publishing strategies with AI-enabled transformation of research supported by opaque systems of data extraction and surveillance. In this talk, Stefan Klein will focus on Elsevier as prominent and highly complex example for the increasing corporate control and shaping of academic knowledge production.

The analysis will construct a strategic trajectory of Elsevier’s waves of digital transformations as evolutionary technography. The results will be discussed using the lens of techno-colonization, an interpretative pattern to illustrate how publishers redesigned the scholarly communication ecosystem driven by an ideology of datafication and high performance institutions in a competitive environment. They not only took ownership and control over journals, rankings, and research infrastructures, but extended these into tools and professional services for university administrations, governments and industry.

The broad consensus that academic publishers’ techno-colonization is dangerous and inacceptable poses the riddle why the academic community so far has shown little resistance, instead engaged in Faustian bargains, collaboration and “voluntary servitude” (La Boétie).

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